Cebu City in Early Cebuano Writings: A Discourse–Historical Study of Urban Space, Cultural Memory, and Identity in Selected Works of Vicente Sotto
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21972984Keywords:
Cebuano literature, cultural memory, discourse-historical approach, identity, urban space, Vicente SottoAbstract
This study examined how Cebu City, Cebuano identity, and cultural memory were discursively constructed in selected early Cebuano writings of Vicente Sotto. It used a qualitative, text-based discourse-historical design under Critical Discourse Analysis, supported by descriptive frequency and percentage counts. The study involved no human respondents; the corpus consisted of ten selected literary and discourse texts chosen purposively for their representations of Cebu, Cebuano people, language, religion, family, gender, colonial experience, public life, and memory. Textual segments were coded through the Discourse-Historical Approach, particularly nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization, and historical recontextualization, and were examined alongside literary features such as imagery, metaphor, symbolism, tone, contrast, enumeration, and evaluative diction. The findings showed that place and institutional nomination was the dominant nomination strategy (50.00%), while gender, family, and moral predication was the most frequent predication pattern (38.10%). Historical and authority-based legitimation led the argumentation patterns (35.29%), locative and institutional lexicalization was the most frequent linguistic and poetic feature (22.9%), and urban and institutional references were the largest category of historical and sociocultural references (23.86%). Across the corpus, Cebu was represented as an urban, religious, educational, cultural, political, colonial, and carceral space, while Cebuano identity was shaped through language, family, gender, religion, national belonging, public participation, memory, and resistance. The study developed the Textual Discourse-Historical Literary Analysis Framework for Cebuano Texts as a systematic, context-sensitive guide for corpus profiling, textual coding, discourse analysis, historical recontextualization, and interpretive synthesis. The findings support the scholarly and educational use of regional literature as a record of place, identity, and cultural memory.
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